One of the very essential parts of our value proposition as a service provider is that we take full responsibility for building and maintaining professional teams. Therefore our customers does not need to care about how teams are built, managed and their knowledge is maintained.

For that reason, we developed robust processes which aim on ensuring fast learning curve of our expert teams, ensure fast and efficient training of new team members and ensure knowledge retention and sharing. These processes fully utilize experience we collected over 18 years of running our expert teams for various customers.  

In our philosophy, we recognize several pillars on which our processes are standing.  

1. First pillar is talent development of our experts. We have dedicated position of talent development manager within our HR department, who is preparing individual development plans for every expert in our company and coordinates their implementation with involved line, project and department managers. Those development plans aim not only on hard skills of our experts, but also their soft skills. 

2. Second pillar is represented by our domain experts and technical leaders. These are exceptionally talented individuals, proven on many projects, who guarantee within our company certain technical competence or domain knowledge. We share capacity of those leaders across projects to ensure high quality and efficiency of our work. Support and training provided by those leaders proves regularly to be the key factor of success of our expert teams. Besides having company-level technical leaders, every project has its own dedicated leaders, who guarantee technical quality and knowledge sharing within the expert team. Based on current project needs the expert team may be extended or reduced, however the dedicated leaders always stay stable in the project to ensure continuity and knowledge retention. 

3. Nobody can know everything and therefore intensive collaboration within our company group as well as partnership with external experts forms third pillar, which enable for our expert team know-how and support they need. 

4. We understand “team work” as sharing and helping. It is part of our company’s DNA which we reflect along the complete employee journey starting candidate pre-selection within our in hiring process. In case our managers or leaders would recognize that any team member is not sharing or helping, they address the issue immediately and ensure improvement. 

5. Last but not least, proper project documentation is important pillar of knowledge retention and efficient training. We maintain various documentation based on project needs and agreement with our customers. We use modern collaborative tools like Confluence which allow easy sharing of the documentation and enables efficient collaboration and feedback communication over the documentation. Due to integrated technology stack and CI/CD pipelines (like Attlasian tool suite), we maintain links between documentation, work tickets and delivered code changes. These tools are combined with modern agile development methodology, which supports intensive team cooperation though daily stand up and regular retrospective meetings. By all that together, we achieve high level of project transparency, which further ease the knowledge sharing and boosts on-boarding of new project members. 

Having an innovative idea is one thing, but bringing it to life is another. Although it may not seem like it, a lot of people have good ideas. But that is usually where it ends. The hard part starts when you decide to bring the idea to life.

And that’s what we are here for. We want to help you realize your idea. Do you have a project that could break down the walls that we face today? Apply to Falling Walls Lab.

Falling Walls Lab is a never-growing network of the most ambitious and forward-thinking minds that aims to deal with the biggest challenges on the planet. It stands for the freedom of thought and scientific research, and for making ground-breaking ideas accessible to society.

Falling Walls Lab is now running an international competition where you can present your project or solution to a problem in 3 minutes. By participating you can open the door to the world, win 1.000 euros and go to the global final in Berlin. Apply by 30 June here and attend the event on 13 September 2022 in Prague.

As sponsoring partner, we are looking forward to your ideas and will keep our fingers crossed.

We are very proud of our colleagues, who are constantly learning and working on themselves. It is thanks to them that we have had many successful projects. For this reason, we would like to present you a certificate that our colleagues have completed – Certified Professional for Requirements Engineering. Possessing an IREB-certification has a main impact for the German, Austrian and Swiss market – for xitee it is a big advantage to have Analysts with this certification!

About the certificate

The Certified Professional for Requirements Engineering (CPRE) is a personal certificate which is suitable for people working in Requirements Engineering, Business Analysis and Testing. This certificate will improve their professional knowledge. Only an independent training providers teach the contents. The certificate does not expire, it has lifetime validity.

Who issues the certification?

The scheme of the certificate is developed by the IREB. IREB, the International Requirements Engineering Board, a non-profit organization, is the provider of the CPRE certification scheme. The board consists of leading RE representatives, who come from science, research, industry and consulting. 

What does one of our team members say about the certification?

“In the field of business analysis this is not the only type of certification, there is also the BABOK (Business Analysis Body of Knowledge) certification which I also have got, but with an IREB certificate we are able to compete on the German market. With IREB I have improved my skill how to model processes using UML.”

And for the ones, who don’t know what an UML-diagram can look like, there is one for an ATM activity case:

We thank all our colleagues and congratulate them once again on possessing this type of a certificate!

With about 475 employees at locations in Germany, Belgium, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Switzerland, the vwd group (today part of Infront) is an internationally active collection of companies with strong roots in the local financial markets.

The vwd group offers customized information, communication and technology solutions for financial services providers, companies, media operations and private clients.

xitee was building the next-generation cloud-based asset management solution, which replaced the current desktop application (VWD Portfolio manager). The vwd portfolio manager is the perfect portfolio management solution for Private Banking and Wealth Management. The system supports all process steps in portfolio management, from planning through implementation to controlling. It gives the user the benefits of a standard software solution which can be scaled to the needs of the user as required very flexibly, quickly, and cost effectively.

The new platform fully adopts microservice architecture and is part of a larger ecosystem where it also collaborates with numerous other microservices that make it easier for the users to interact with their customers in compliance with regulatory requirements.

xitee was responsible for development of both back-end and front-end part of the system. The back-end team oversees building Position, Transaction, Risk and Performance services which provide data from various existing systems to new web-based front-end.

And the front-end team was building brand new Angular Dashboard & Widget based application to display various information useful for individual investors.

Technologies: Java, Spring Boot, Hibernate, Swagger, Gradle, Docker, CockroachDB, Flyway, Prometheus, Asciidoc, Angular, PrimeNG, RxJS, Highcharts, Sass.

vwd TransactionSolutions AG is a financial brokerage company, which develops, operates and offers financial securities trading and distribution systems. With several important in-house systems, vwd is a key player in the financial brokerage and market connectivity on the European stock exchanges.

The overall focus is on the operation of securities trading centres in a wide variety of forms:

  • off-exchange
  • on-exchange
  • limit trading
  • request-for-quotes
  • matching systems
turned-on MacBook Pro

xConvertor is a B2B connectivity solution providing customized access to many different stock or energy exchanges as a primary connection for trading. It connects brokers with markets and market makers and converts their communication (e.g., orders, quotes, etc.). The conversion is not only covering different technical interfaces (e.g., various FIX dialects, JSON, etc.), but it also provides business logic conversions. As an example, we compensate differences in message workflows, map and convert differently generated IDs and do other content conversions of the messages.

Application architecture was decided to be a point-to-point bridge with inner routing and generic, highly configurable conversion engine. Specific type of routing differs between plugins. Application supports multiple connections in a single instance and multiple instances running in parallel.

Technologies: Java 11, Spring, QuickFixJ, Log4J, Gradle, Oracle SQL, Git

With about 475 employees at locations in Germany, Belgium, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Switzerland, the vwd group (today part of Infront) is an internationally active collection of companies with strong roots in the local financial markets.

The vwd group offers customized information, communication and technology solutions for financial services providers, companies, media operations and private clients.

turned on flat screen monitor

Our team was responsible for the architecture, development, and maintenance of a core system, which handles permission requests of 100.000+ client terminals downloading the financial data every day.

One part of the system is a web-based application providing a complete setup and maintenance of permissions to financial data. The other one is a very sophisticated back-end engine which allows small crew to very efficiently manage permissions of large pool of clients’ terminals.

The main challenge was to find a solution, which satisfies needs of operations for efficient management based on patters with needs of business to adjust the setup to a specific contractual arrangement of individual customers. This was successfully achieved by using highly sophisticated template engine which we designed. The system also created input data for other systems, for example, the SAP-based accounting applications.

For the back end, we used .NET technologies and Microsoft SQL Servers and Angular for the front-end.

UX stands for “user experience”. It focuses on the users and their interaction with the product. The goal of UX design at xitee is to give our clients and developers a realistic view of the solution before it is actually created. This gives them a better idea and understanding of the look and feel, interactions, features, accessibility on different devices and platforms, and functionality of the software. This can ultimately save significant financial resources.

UI design is more specifically concerned with the “user interface”, which is the graphical layout of the solution. This includes screen layouts, transitions, interface animations and every single micro-interaction. It also includes colours, buttons that users click on, texts, images, sliders, text entry fields and all other items that the user interacts with.

Our approach:

We follow a user-oriented approach to create highly functional and affordable products for our customers. In the first phase, we learn and get to know the customer’s business requirements. Specifically, this means understanding the context in which users may use the solution. In the second phase, we create the design. The outputs are then evaluated based on user requirements. We perform these phases in iterations until the evaluation results are satisfactory. The last phase is then the implementation of the final designs.

tuned on Macbook

The benefits of good UX/UI design lead to:

  • reduction of development costs
  • increase the quality of the solution (by creating user journeys and incorporating customer feedback)
  • a realistic idea of the final product
  • increase customer satisfaction, engagement and loyalty
  • building the customer’s brand (by incorporating the company’s design and logo)
  • higher Google search engine rankings (because customers have longer interaction with a UX-optimised website)

xitee offers:

  • User journeys: a user journey is a visualisation of the process a person goes through to accomplish an intended task. It is usually presented as a series of steps in which a person interacts with a product. Our goal is to study your users, understand their behavior, and design a user journey that allows users to achieve their desired tasks with minimal effort.
  • Wireframes: wireframes represent the path users take when interacting with a website or application, including user interface elements such as buttons or images.
  • Mockups: mockups are the last preview of the final version of the product, allowing clients or users to get to know the overall design of the product before its development.
  • Prototypes: prototypes are interactive mockups – final versions of the product that are clickable and allow you to test the main way the product interacts, also before its actual development.
  • Post-launch metrics analysis: metrics are signals that show whether our UX strategy is working. Using metrics is the key to tracking changes over time. We can help you set up and use analytics tools like Google analytics or Piwik.

Since the pandemic situation of Covid-19, digitalisation has become more important. Companies are now facing the questions such as how to provide personalised and confidential advice online? How to close a valid contract directly during an online meeting? What does the customer really expect during an online advice session?

Even before the pandemic, there was already a large number of online services, but only 34% of customers really preferred these services. Today, twice as many customers prefer them than before the pandemic. Digital interaction with customers has also increased dramatically. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the older or younger generation, ultimately everyone has been in a certain way forced into digital change. Companies are of course aware of this trend and know that they have to adapt to customer expectations.

two people shaking hands

However, it is important to mention that while on the one hand the use of online services is increasing, on the other hand consumers prefer human interaction more than before. Today, 83% of consumers prefer human contact, which is a higher percentage than before Covid-19. Moreover, customers prefer online services only in situations involving less important matters. If they need advice on complex decisions they seek face-to-face meetings.

For these reasons, there is a need to combine services offered online and face-to-face contact. Switch from purely online services to virtual face-to-face advice. This is what customers expect. According to Accenture, the linking of physical and digital experiences called “phygital” is becoming a standard. The competitive advantage in 2021 is end-to-end customer service platform that creates a secure and personalised dialogue between customer and advisor. This is why we are entering the Czech market with the LiveContract solution.  Advisors can share real-time documents, videos, configurators with customers in an easy and fast way without prior registration/authentication/downloading an app. This enables online consultation without loss of personal access. The platform allows the customer to make an instant purchase decision and sign the contract directly during the consultation without any interruption, in a legally binding manner according to the EU eIDAS regulation on any end device. What will not change in the future are the demands for simplicity, speed, accessibility and customer convenience.

If you too want to increase your close rate and offer your customers the best experience read more here or book a demo here.

Wiener Börse AG operates the stock markets in Vienna and Prague  and provides IT services for exchanges in Budapest, Zagreb and Ljubljana. The core trading system used is Xetra® T7 from Deutsche Börse. Wiener Börse operates its own software providing connectivity for Xetra® T7 to enable members a simplified connectivity using FIX interface (CEESEG FIX).

This solution further provides the Xetra® T7 market data feed to the data dissemination system ADH (Alliance Data Highway) of Wiener Börse. Monitoring and data analysis tools are also part of the system.

An additional service is TTR II (MiFID II Post trade OTC reporting).

The xitee team is responsible for maintenance and further development of these Software solutions.

There are six foundation blocks (Version control, Continuous integration, Issue tracking, Unit tests, Reviews, Code analysis) that ensure the quality of the software and therefore of the product itself. Various synergies between the specific parts enable transparency and maintainability. At the same time these components work as a toolkit for every single software developer.

Through the usage of a version control, each modification of the code is comprehensibly documented, and each version can be restored at any time. This grants flexibility to the development and allows a precise analysis of all arising errors of the software.  

The use of a continuous integration (CI) system allows a controlled compiling of new software versions as well as continuous reporting for the developers regarding any arising errors during the compilation. Additionally, automatically elicited key figures, which display the state of the product, can be generated and reported. Features and bugs, as well as milestones and project tasks, are managed through the Issue tracking system (JIRA and / or Confluence). This creates traceable and transparent development from requirement analysis to delivery and allows the creation of relationships between individual tasks or features. 

The Interaction between these three systems (Version Control, CI, Issue Tracker) as well as the interaction of the developers with them provides additional benefits, which increase the quality of the products even more. Any changes only need to be documented once, since the version control, issue tracking and CI systems automatically transfer the modifications. Because of this automatic transfer to the Issue Tracking System, every change is assigned uniquely to one requirement, which provides complete traceability to each action. The developer gains quick feedback through the CI System, since each change in code automatically generates a new software-version.

The usage of Unit-Tests and the integration of these tests into the CI System allows a quick identification and debugging of errors, even while the software is still in development.  

Additional to this, reviews ensure that at least two people view and test the code before a component is cleared for further testing.